Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

March 26, 2013

Advertisers are “speaking the language of social media,” writesNew York Times ad columnist Stuart Elliott:

The language of social media — “fans,” “friend request,” “like,” “social network” and, yes, “status update” — is increasingly appearing in advertising, whether or not those ads are running in social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Here’s one of Elliott’s examples: a print ad from paper company Domtar.

If Domtar had really wanted to sound current, the headline might have borrowed a popular meme and inverted the headline: “Because PAPER.”

For students of marketing history, “Paper Because” evokes a famous and long-running campaign for “feminine-hygiene” products – a subject once so taboo that it could be referred to only elliptically. And, as it turned out, beautifully.

One of our greatest fears as social animals is that someone (or a large group of someones) might be mocking us behind our backs, in ways so silent or subtle that we might never know that we are in fact being mocked. Is this happening to you, right now, on Twitter, while you remain ignorant of it? Yes. Yes it is.

I started seeing “subtweet” a few months ago – it’s been in circulation for at least three years, according to Urban Dictionary, although I haven’t identified the moment of conception – and reached a much different conclusion about its etymology: I thought “sub” came from “subcontract” or “substitute” and that subtweets were ghostwritten. “Subliminal” – “below the threshold of conscious perception” – never occurred to me at all, and I’m still not convinced it’s an apt term for the practice.

I did, however, eventually find a definition for “canoe tweet” (aka Twitter canoe), which is mentioned in the subhed but not explained in the post: “to make some argument and stick someone's handle at the end of the tweet (instead of doing it as a reply), forcing their followers to have to click through to see what the argument was even about, i.e.,‘Some people don't understand subtweeting. @shani_o’”

December 14, 2012

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

Negropolitan’s slightly cryptic reference is to Colorado’s passage of Amendment 64, which legalizes the use of recreational marijuana. –sterdam has become the de facto suffix for “legal pot,” in tribute to Amsterdam. (See Hamsterdam and Oaksterdam). The ver-ster combination makes this coinage especially hilarious, at least to me.

October 23, 2012

It’s a fairly safe bet that no one’s drinking game for last night’s presidential debate included “horses and bayonets.” Yet that phrase, with its antique echoes of the Charge of the Light Brigade, was the evening’s surprise zinger, inspiring hundreds of tweets and an instant Horses and Bayonets Tumblr.

The line was President Obama’s, part of his response to Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s familiar charge that the US Navy has fewer ships than it did in 1916:

Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we're counting ships. It's — it's what are our capabilities.

By amazing coincidence, I’d been preparing my own bayonet zinger, and I thank the president for giving me such a high-profile introduction to a little naming oddity: the Bayonet Sofa, brought to you by a company called – no joke – Handy Living.

The sofa is available (cheap!) from Amazon and Walmart, where a customer complains that “it’s not super comfortable.” With a name like Bayonet, what did she expect? Ouch!

A bayonet, for the record, is “a steel stabbing weapon fitted to the muzzle of a firearm.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word comes from French baïonnette. That may or may not be because the weapons were made in the French city of Bayonne. Yes, it’s another case of “uncertain origin.”

Equally uncertain: why anyone would want to name a piece of upholstered furniture after a sharp steel weapon. Maybe the folks at Handy Living thought Bayonet just sounded fancy and special, like baronet or coronet. Or maybe they hoped the suggestion of bristling bayonets would inspire shoppers to, you know, charge.

IKEA. The global home-furnishings company reveals its humble roots in its name, which is an acronym. I and K are the initials of Ingvar Kamprad, the company's founder; the E stands for Elmtaryd, the farm where Kamprad grew up; and the A is for Agunnaryd, Kamprad's home village. As for the names of IKEA's products — Bestå, Poäng, Ektorp, and all the rest — there's a method to their seeming madness.

July 31, 2012

I couldn’t help myself: When I received this email last week from Jigsaw, the UK-based women’s retailer, I had to get involved.

“Gold Metal Winners of the Season,” read the headline. And yet…

… there were no metallic elements in evidence.

No gold in the rest of the email, either.

You’d think that with the incessant media harping on Olympic medal count, someone at Jigsaw—hello, proofreader!—would have recognized the erroneous homophone and fixed it. But no.

So I did what had to be done: I tweeted about the mistake. To its credit, Jigsaw promptly expressed chagrin.

Cute tweet—although I can’t help meddling one more time. There are two Ls in “metallurgist,” Jigsaw. (Yes, on both sides of the pond.)

Let this serve as a reminder to companies that send emails to their customers: Those emails are advertisements. They need to be professionally written and edited and proofread before they’re sent. (I bet you double-check the prices. The words are important, too.)

June 15, 2012

Each week, the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog posts a Twitter contest with the hashtag #tnyquestion. The June 1 contest asked readers to contribute a new word to the English language; the results have been compiled in a handsome PDF dictionary. The June 8 contest—invent a corporate-literary mashup—resulted in more than a thousand responses, including “Of Mice and Mennen,” “A Tale of Two Citis,” and (from yours truly) “50 Shades of Grey Poupon.” Winners revealed here. (Note: I cannot claim credit for “Pninterest”; I only retweeted it.)

“Logic is the enemy of a successful brand name,” writes veteran marketing strategist Al Ries. Example: “Search.com is shorter (one syllable instead of two), more memorable and a lot more credible than Google.com. Should Google.com change its name to Search.com?” (Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

April 17, 2012

If you’re interested in English-language slang from the early 19th century—and who wouldn’t be?—you’ll want to follow @Vulgar_Tongue, which tweets citations from Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. A few examples: scandal broth (tea), sir reverence (a turd), and sea lawyer (a shark). The entire book is available online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

Past naming trends—remember all those “tronics”?—hold clues to the future of naming. Alan Brew, a principal at brand strategy firm RiechesBaird, makes the case.

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“Stop talking about names, start talking about characteristics of names”: good advice from Nancy’s Baby Names that works for the company- or product-naming process too.

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Episode 6 of Lexicon Valley, the linguistics podcast on Slate.com, is about how Scrabble, “a math game disguised as a word game,” reveals “the essential beauty of English.” The podcast features an interview with Word Freak author Stefan Fatsis. (All of the Lexicon Valley podcasts are well worth your time. Each one is about 30 minutes long.)

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What makes a movie quote memorable? A team of Cornell University computer scientists compared short, memorable lines from about 1,000 movies and compared them to other lines spoken by the same characters in the same films. Read about their findings at Technology Review (I love the title of their paper: “You Had Me at Hello: How Phrasing Affects Memorability”), then take the test yourself.

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To atone for her absence from blogging, trademark lawyer Lara Pearson of Brand Geek researched SORRY trademarks. She found 22 registered marks and 19 pending marks with SORRY in their names, including the famous board game, an apparel brand, and SORRY FOR PARTYING, “a lifestyle brand connecting those who need an elegant way to apologize for doing everything wrong, yet so right.”

“When copywriter Robert Pirosh landed in Hollywood in 1934, eager to become a screenwriter, he wrote and sent the following letter to all the directors, producers, and studio executives he could think of.” It begins “I like words,” and it’s delicious. From Lists of Note. P.S.: Pirosh went on to win a screenwriting Oscar in 1949.

February 15, 2012

The “Downton Abbey” anachronisms story certainly has legs. I wrote about one out-of-place usage, “to contact [someone],” in January; this week Ben Zimmer compiled a video of several ahead-of-their-time usages and wrote about them for the Visual Thesaurus. Graduate student Ben Schmidt goes further and deeper in a post on his Sapping Attention blog that summarizes the results of feeding “every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English [l]anguage, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.” (Via Language Hat.) “Black market,” “shortages,” “mitral valve prolapse,” and even “wartime” and “peacetime”? All rare or unheard-of in England in the nineteen-teens. (“To have legs” = to show potential for a long run. First documented in 1930, “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” according to the OED. Keep that in mind when you write your Civil War novel.)

From another subculture, a dictionary of Western slang, lingo, and phrases, wherein I learned that a “banjo” is a miner’s term for a short-handled shovel and “goat meat” is venison killed out of season. As far as I could ascertain, the lexicon is free of Deadwood-esque naughty words.

Speaking of stupid myths, did your fourth-grade teacher tell you there was a “rule” about never ending a sentence with a preposition? Then I implore you to listen to Slate’s new Lexicon Valley podcast, “Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?” And worry no more about what you end your sentences with.

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And speaking of sentences and endings, here’s an appropriate cartoon by Wiley, via Mighty Red Pen: